Precarious Democracy

Ethnographies of Hope, Despair, and Resistance in Brazil

Edited by Benjamin Junge, Sean T. Mitchell, Alvaro Jarrin, and Lucia Cantero

Rutgers University Press

Brazil changed drastically in the 21st century’s second decade. In 2010, the country’s outgoing president Lula left office with almost 90% approval. As the presidency passed to his Workers' Party successor, Dilma Rousseff, many across the world hailed Brazil as a model of progressive governance in the Global South. Yet, by 2019, those progressive gains were being dismantled as the far right-wing politician Jair Bolsonaro assumed the presidency of a bitterly divided country. Digging beneath this pendulum swing of policy and politics, and drawing on rich ethnographic portraits, Precarious Democracy shows how these transformations were made and experienced by Brazilians far from the halls of power. Bringing together powerful and intimate stories and portraits from Brazil's megacities to rural Amazonia, this volume demonstrates the necessity of ethnography for understanding social and political change, and provides crucial insights on one of the most epochal periods of change in Brazilian history.

'Precarious Democracy presents a kaleidoscopic view of contemporary Brazil through a rich collection of ethnographies and a range of thoughtful analyses and insights about ordinary people throughout the country as they respond in multiple ways to the rise and political consolidation of the far-right in recent years. It is essential reading for understanding what is going on in Brazil today.' James N. Green, author of Exile within Exiles: Herbert Daniel, Gay Brazilian Revolutionary

This collection offers rich, theoretically evocative ethnographies on a range of sites seldom brought together in a single volume, from family frictions that expose the polarization of the past decade to guns and the performance of masculinity to Black queer resilience amid Brazil’s rightward shift. The assembled cases foreground feminist, anti-racist, and decolonial epistemologies and shed unique light on Brazil’s 'unraveling,' bringing into view the precarity often underlying formal democratic arrangements, even, or perhaps especially, those governed by the Left. Sonia E. Alvarez, co-editor of Beyond Civil Society: Activism, Participation, and Protest in Latin America

'Precarious Democracy presents a kaleidoscopic view of contemporary Brazil through a rich collection of ethnographies and a range of thoughtful analyses and insights about ordinary people throughout the country as they respond in multiple ways to the rise and political consolidation of the far-right in recent years. It is essential reading for understanding what is going on in Brazil today.' James N. Green, author of Exile within Exiles: Herbert Daniel, Gay Brazilian Revolutionary

This collection offers rich, theoretically evocative ethnographies on a range of sites seldom brought together in a single volume, from family frictions that expose the polarization of the past decade to guns and the performance of masculinity to Black queer resilience amid Brazil’s rightward shift. The assembled cases foreground feminist, anti-racist, and decolonial epistemologies and shed unique light on Brazil’s 'unraveling,' bringing into view the precarity often underlying formal democratic arrangements, even, or perhaps especially, those governed by the Left. Sonia E. Alvarez, co-editor of Beyond Civil Society: Activism, Participation, and Protest in Latin America

BENJAMIN JUNGE is a professor of anthropology at the State University of New York at New Paltz. He is the author of Cynical Citizenship: Gender, Regionalism and Political Subjectivity in Porto Alegre, Brazil and co-editor of Lived Religion and Lived Citizenship.

SEAN T. MITCHELL is an associate professor of anthropology at Rutgers University-Newark. He is the author of the award-winning, Constellations of Inequality: Space, Race, and Utopia in Brazil and co-editor of Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency.

ALVARO JARRÍN is an associate professor of anthropology at The College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. He is the author of The Biopolitics of Beauty: Cosmetic Citizenship and Affective Capital in Brazil and co-editor of Remaking the Human: Cosmetic Technologies of Body Repair, Reshaping, and Replacement.

LUCIA CANTERO is an assistant professor of international studies at the University of San Francisco, California. She is the author of The Waste of Accumulation: The ‘Shock of Order’ Campaign and the Right to Rio 2016.

List of Acronyms
Editors’ Introduction: Ethnographies of the Brazilian Unravelling by Benjamin Junge, Alvaro Jarrin, Lucia Cantero, and Sean T. Mitchell
A Plan for a Country Still Looking for Democracy: A Critical Overview by Lilia Moritz Schwarcz

Part I: The Intimacy of Power
Chapter 1: “Family is Everything”: Generational Tensions as a Working-Class Household from Recife, Brazil Contemplates the 2018 Presidential Elections by Benjamin Junge
Chapter 2: Among Mothers and Daughters: Economic Mobility and Political Identity in a Northeastern Periferia by Jessica Jerome
Chapter 3: Dreaming with Guns: Performing Masculinity and Imagining Consumption in Bolsonaro’s Brazil by Isabela Kalil, Rosana Pinheiro-Machado, and Lucia Mury Scalco
Chapter 4: Whiteness Has Come Out of the Closet and Intensified Brazil’s Reactionary Wave by Patricia de Santana Pinho

Part II: Corruption and Crime
Chapter 5: Cruel Pessimism: The Affect of Anti-Corruption and the End of the New Brazilian Middle Class by Sean T. Mitchell
Chapter 6: The Effects of Some Religious Affects: Revolutions in Crime by Karina Biondi
Chapter 7: “Look at that”: Cures, Poisons, and Shifting Rationalities in the Backlands that have become a Sea (of Money) by John Collins
Chapter 8: The Oil is Ours: Petrobras, Corruption and Extractive Global Lawfare by Lucia Cantero

Part III: Infrastructures of Hope
Chapter 9: Despairing Hopes (and Hopeful Despair) in Amazonia by David Rojas, Andrezza Alves Spexoto Olival, and Alexandre de Azevedo Olival
Chapter 10: Tempered Hopes: (Re)producing the Middle Class in Recife’s Alternative Music Scene by Falina Enriquez
Chapter 11: Withering Dreams: Material Hope and Apathy among Brazil’s Once Rising Poor by Moisés Kopper
Chapter 12: Bolsonaro Wins Japan: Support for the Far Right among Japanese-Brazilian Overseas Labor Migrants by Sarah LeBaron von Baeyer

Part IV: Old Challenges, New Activism
Chapter 13: Holding the Wave: Black LGBTI+ Feminist Resilience Amidst the Reactionary Turn in Rio de Janeiro by LaShandra Sullivan
Chapter 14: LGBTTI Elders in Brazil: Subjectivation and Narratives about Resilience, Resistance and Vulnerability by Carlos Eduardo Henning
Chapter 15: Disgust and Defiance: The Visceral Politics of Trans and Travesti Activism Amidst a Heteronormative Backlash by Alvaro Jarrín
Chapter 16: “Barbie e Ken, Cidadãos de Bem”: Memes and Political Participation among College Students in Brazil by Melanie A. Medeiros, Patrick McCormick, Erika Schmitt, and James Kale

Acknowledgments
Notes on Contributors
Index

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